I jerked upright and felt a tension on my wrist at the same moment the journal slid from my chest onto the floor. Brodie’s voice, sleepy and yet alert, sounded from the bed beside me. “Lie down, girl.”
There was a cord around my wrist, I realized upon inspection, a slipknot in a silky fabric. Brodie rolled to his side, facing me, and I felt a corresponding tug. I was tethered to him.Like a dog.
Outrage flooded me. “What the hell is this?” I said, the words rising on a screech. “A fucking leash?”
“Calm yourself. Until I know I can trust you, it’s the easiest way for me to ensure you don’t slip out during the night.” He snaked his free arm around my torso, just under my breasts, and pressed me back into the mattress.
I couldn’t do this. My breath was already quickening, my throat tightening at the feel of his arm, heavy atop me.
“I can’t —” The words were a wheeze. I grabbed his arm with my hands, aware in another part of my consciousness of the crisp hair beneath my fingers, and pushed. He didn’t move, and I felt a tear slide down my cheek.
“Em.” Dimly, I felt the mattress shift as he raised up on his opposite elbow. He slid his arm up, grazing my breasts, until he could cup my jaw in his hand and turn my face to his. “You’re all right. I’m not going to hurt you.”
I shut my eyes tight, trying to block out his concerned face, hovering so close to my own. “Please,” I whispered.
“Jaysus. Who the feck hurt ye?”
At the question, a shiver born of remembered fear started deep in my spine. It trembled and gasped its way through every rigid muscle until it held my entire body in its painful grasp.
“No…”
Brodie pulled me full against him, maneuvering me easily until I lay on top of him, my soft yielding to his firm. He wrapped one arm firmly around my waist and began stroking, a long, lazy slide of his hand, up and down my spine.
I shook against him. Even though I was in the dominant position, I knew he was in control.
“Close your eyes, macushla. Use your other senses.” He gentled me as one did a horse, with the purr in his voice and the firm, easy stroke of his hand, and I closed my eyes.
Beneath my ear, his heart beat. Steady, calming. Heat from his body seeped into my skin and I felt myself relaxing into him. He crooned nonsense in a language I assumed to be Gaelic until the tremors ceased and I lay limp against him.
My body trusted that he meant no harm, even as my head was hung up on the lie.
Despite the conflict between the two, I allowed his heat and solidity, along with the gentle stroke of his hand and the cadence of his voice, to lull me back to sleep.
Sunlight crept in through a crack in the blinds, falling weak and pale against my face but still doing its job to rouse me. I opened my eyes, feeling more rested than I had in a while. Except for that one nightmare, I’d slept like a rock—
Not a nightmare.
Slowly, I became aware of Brodie behind me. We’d shifted during the night, and were spooning now, his arm heavy around my waist and heat pouring off of him like a furnace.
It was perhaps the most cliche scene in romance novels since the 1980s. The “I’ve just awoken to you spooning me...now what?” scene. Did men really like to cuddle as much as all that?
And would morning wood really make my clothes fall off?
I could feel him, pressing firm against my backside, and regardless of my inner stream of consciousness, had to resist the urge to push back against him. I needed to be moving in the opposite direction, though. His breath against the back of my neck was sending tingles zapping down my spine; his thumb barely brushing the under-curve of my breast. And for the first time since The Incident, I wasn’t consumed by panic.
I was, however, becoming rapidly consumed by plain, old-fashioned lust.
This was not happening. I would not allow my kidnapper to seduce me.
Drawing my arm back a few inches, I elbowed him hard in the gut. He coiled in on himself with an oof, grabbing his side. “Jaysus Christ, girl, you’d think you could give a man some warning!”
“Warning my big toe.” I climbed out of the bed and peeled the slip knot from my wrist and pointed at his lap. “This is the only warning you’re going to get. Keep your dick far away from my ass.”
His eyes hooded. “What about other places?”
Cretin. He was a certified cretin. I stomped away to the bathroom without replying and wrenched the shower knob over to hot. While I waited for it to warm, I shimmied out of my nightshirt and panties and hollered loudly enough for him to hear me in the bedroom. “Go make me coffee, Kidnapper!” I heard a grunt, took it for assent, and climbed in the shower.
There was a feminine smelling soap on the shelf with his. I picked his up, inhaling the crisp oaky scent, and then exchanged it for the citrus and vanilla scent that was clearly mine. I had just squirted a dollop into my hand when the shower door opened and Brodie stepped in, naked and shameless.
